Law in Motion: Traffic Policing, Speeding, and the Everyday State in Urban India

Abstract

In this paper, I trace the social life of law as it shapes—and is shaped by—quotidian motoring practices in urban India. While laws, rules, and codes that regulate humans and vehicles exist on paper, scholarship on how motorists and state actors understand, interpret, and enact these laws is still scant. In the backdrop of a continued public discourse around road safety, rule-disobedience, infrastructural aspirations, and class inequality in the country, how does law mediate driving (and riding, henceforth) in cities? Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, this paper analyses how motorists make sense of traffic law enforcement (with particular focus on speeding) and how these interpretations orient motorists vis-à-vis the everyday state and the city. The material, structural and infrastructural conditions of driving, I ultimately argue, produce situational and contingent relationships to traffic laws and to the state.